The mineshaft has one cave spider spawner – I destroyed the second one I found – along with a zombie, skeleton, and a regular spider spawner. No real excellent loot, probably the most valuable thing were 19 more precious gold blocks. It will take quite a while to cart all that stuff back to the main base, but I’m not too interested in that for the majority of the items – why worry about adding to overflow storage ?

Rude little cave shelter

This base leads to the mineshaft and is a mere 10 blocks or so from the 500 longitude mark, where the road has been cut south to the limits shown on the map. Still no jungle.

I am finding a surprising feature to not using Amidst – actually exploring and trying to find new biomes. It’s a lot of fun. Of course, the way I set the world using the options made each biome huge and less likely to show new ones, but that’s part of the fun. As it is, each patch of birch forest I pass, I find myself looking over the horizon hoping for something new. When I found the swamp it was quite a moment; at the southern map extreme is birch forest hills, which are different, in that I’ll need to tunnel through some hills. At the moment, my biome list is

Birch Forest

Normal Forest

Mesa (of course)

Desert

Swamp

Plains

Extreme hills

Roofed Forest

River

No ocean found yet, which is a bit odd, with most of the other biomes not expected to be found. But I sure ain’t going to quit looking. I had no idea of the enjoyment I might get by not using Amidst.

Ideas for things to do include :

Nether Portal. Along with a structure to hold it since mobs now come through.

Railroad along the road system. The only question being if I have enough gold.

Expand the homebase. I really have no idea what I’d like it to look like, is the main stumbling block at the moment.

Do something cool with the desert temple right along one branch of the road

Expand the map room and make really big ones. The only problem with maps is, filling them out at high zoom levels takes a long time. I have a single Level 3 map, and haven’t attempted to make any Level 2 or lower.

Instead of doing any of that, I’m back in the Mineshaft, still digging, still exploring.